Inside look at Foxconn claims to show all

Posted April 12, 2012 - 10:48
by
Raven Lovecraft

There's a new video that claims to show exactly what goes on at the elusive overseas manufacturing plant.

Reporter Rob Schmitz gained an unprecedented level of access to the plant, though of course by no means was he unsupervised. And of course, the company knew well in advance that he was coming to visit.

Nevertheless, when you have a company that huge with such massive deadlines and requirements, it's not like you can easily adjust the entire plant just for one lone reporter.

Schmitz said one of his biggest misconceptions was thinking of the place as "a factory." "After you enter the gates and walk around, you quickly realize that it’s also a city — 240,000 people work here. Nearly 50,000 of them live on campus in shared dorm rooms," he said.

Hundreds of employees have seen psychological therapists on-site for having suicidal thoughts. Apparently this kind of problem has been going on for quite a while but Foxconn tried to cover up the details and no one found out anything, untill a few years ago when a story broke about an employee who was thought to have stolen an iPhone prototype committed suicide from his home.

The once-elusive company is now a mainstream name for anyone who has tuned into the news at all this year, and it has scrambled to provide solutions that will get the media off its back.

One of the most bizarre things Foxconn did was to wrap huge safety nets around its manufacturing facilities that would hopefully catch anyone else who tried to jump to death.

However, there was at least one employee that still managed to die even after being caught by the net, just by the sheer impact of the fall.